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"Linux is *the* threat," Says Microsoft
Ami Ganguli writes "Anybody who works selling Linux into large accounts should read this leaked MS memo on The Register. Show it to your clients as well. The good news is that Microsoft is scared. The bad news is that these guys play tough. On the other hand, I've worked with IBM sales before, and they're no push-overs either." And it appears that they want to go after the the City of Largo as well.
Actually we should send Linux victories to the person who wrote this memo. I'd wager this memo was intentionally "leaked" to have a demoralizing effect on the Linux community. We can only be so courteous in return.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
If you are referring to the Linux phenomenon/hype, I don't know.
But if we look at Free Software in the broader sense, the answer is that even Microsoft is not powerful enough to crush the Free Software community. It might be harder than before to use Free Software (because you cannot access some content on the Web, or you cannot use certain hardware), but this would only result in a return to the level of, say 1995.
Of course, there are threats to the Free Software community. The most dangerous one is abolishing the general purpose computer, i.e. a computer on which you decide which software you run and install. Abolishing the general purpose computer is certainly on the agenda of the copyright industry (look at all these copy prevention schemes), but it is not something Microsoft can do alone.
mod parent up! This says exactly what I've been talking about to my various managers for years. The big problem is, the argument is starting to fall apart. Win2k is almost acceptable from a technical viewpoint, so you need to get into more detail. Exec's don't want to hear detail, their eyes glaze over. At that point, you lose. I'm on the IT Architecture team here now, and I'm finding it difficult to even get the rest of the team to listen. grrrrr. I did manage to get them to consider allowing us to install a Linux box running Oracle 9iAS though, so I think I 'm getting a win. It occurs to me that we (us geeks and sysadmin types) are the only people really selling Linux, our counterparts in M$ land are professional sales people. We kick their ass technically, don't we? No wonder it's tough for us to beat them in the board room, closing the sale so to speak.
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
Several people have made comments about how linux will not be truely competative until any joe can stick it in isntall and reboot:
I work as a IT person. In the last two months I have done ~10 linux and ~10 windows installs.
Total problems that caused install to take more than 2 hours with WinNT/98 - 6
Total problems that caused install to take more than 2 hours with RedHat 7.1/7.2 - 1
I'm not the average person, but if you just want to pop a cd in and go, redhat is MUCH better than any MS OS has ever been (although I haven't been able to try the XP install).
Spell check? Why bother. That is what grammer/spelling Nazi freaks who waiste band width posting "spell right" are for.
> I didn't see one thing in that memo which was a big deal.
I did: Ameritrade tried to migrate to Linux servers & failed. And once the CIO left (obviously due to the failed migration), MS marketroids swept in & convinced them to go with Win2000.
I'd like to know a little more about this failure. We need to learn from the mistakes made here, in order to improve Linux. (And when those Win 2000 servers start breaking, for the next person to come up with a better Linux/BSD implementation.)
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p